Customer relationship marketing & enterprise performance

Abstract

The seeming eternal pursuit of profit by financial institutions and other enterprises has proved to be short-sighted judging from recent studies. Emphases have shifted to securing the goose that lays the golden egg (the customer) rather than the egg itself. This study focused on the imperative of deploying evolving customer-centric platforms such as CRM to manage customer needs satisfactorily to guarantee continued patronage and profit (performance). CRM is revealed as a competitive strategy hotly becoming popular among Nigerian banks - extant literature on its dynamics was clinically x-rayed. Models of relationship management such as relational benefit, network and relational quality models were discussed about service offerings. Survey research was used in a cross-sectional study to test the nature of the association between CRM predictor variables of interactive marketing, service quality and bonding among leading banks in the South-South geopolitical zone of Nigeria. These variables were tested to ascertain whether they would become significant predictors of performance among the leading banks sampled. The outcome reveals a positive association and a strongly significant influence at 0.05%. This necessitated the rejection of all two hypotheses tested.